New Study Explores Mentor Intentions

Introduction

In Japan, admission offers often arrive several months before the start of the academic year, and institutions frequently fill that time with pre-enrollment coursework and peer support. Park and Sugita (2026) examined a 10-week online pre-entry program at Kanda University of International Studies and explored what makes participants willing to become mentors themselves the following year.

Methods

The researchers conducted a secondary analysis of an end-of-program evaluation survey completed by 330 incoming students across 11 departments where mentoring was built into the curriculum. Using logistic regression, they tested whether students’ perceptions of mentoring’s usefulness and their sense of weekly workload predicted intention to serve as a mentor later. They also reviewed open-ended comments for redesign ideas.

Results

Just over half of respondents, 52.5%, said they wanted to mentor the following year. Students rated the overall program favorably, with 98.2% giving it top-two agreement scores, with 89.4%, feeling the 10-week length was appropriate. Students who rated mentoring as more useful were much more likely to say they wanted to become mentors themselves. Each step up on the four-point usefulness scale corresponded to roughly 76% higher odds of wanting to mentor next year, and that pattern held steady even after the researchers double-checked it with several different statistical approaches, including one that accounted for the fact that students were grouped by department. However, students who felt buried in weekly work were only slightly less likely to want to mentor than those who felt the workload was about right, and that difference was too small and inconsistent to call reliable. The researchers also analyzed whether a heavy workload changed how much usefulness mattered, and it predicted mentoring intent about the same way regardless of how busy students felt.

Discussion

Among suggestions for improving the overall program, more than a third centered on the pacing and volume of weekly work, while smaller groups pointed to mentor access and clearer communication about what was expected. When asked specifically about the mentoring component, the single most common critique concerned how reachable and responsive mentors were, followed by comments about workload pacing and the quality of peer interaction. These patterns suggest that students wanted mentoring that arrived on time, followed predictable communication patterns, and came with clearly defined boundaries around what mentors could and could not help with. Sustainable mentoring in this context was less about how much students are asked to do and more about whether the support structure around them is coherent, timely, and dependable.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

The findings point toward three priorities for institutions. First, setting explicit norms around response times and communication could reduce the uncertainty that seemed to drive complaints about mentor access, particularly during the earliest and most disorienting weeks of the program. Second, attention to the distribution and clarity of weekly tasks may do more to ease strain than cutting workload, since students’ comments suggested that predictability mattered as much as the number of hours required. Third, keeping mentor roles clearly bounded through training and supervision, with defined paths for escalating issues to staff, may protect mentors from taking on more than they can reasonably manage while keeping the experience positive enough that they want to return the following year.

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